Enginzyme raises SEK 75 million to take its enzymes from the lab to the factory: an interview with Aymeric de Gantès
A Swedish deeptech that fixes enzymes onto a support so they can be reused in industrial plants, a recognized technology that now has to find its market, and a new CEO who joined in 2025 to put business back at the center. A look at a funding round in industrial biotech, and at a go-to-market measured in months of production at the customer's site.
At the end of September, enginzyme announced the close of a SEK 75 million round (just under €7 million). Two new investors, Lotus One Investment and Valquest Partners Europe, join the cap table and the board. Existing shareholders, including Sofinnova Partners, Industrifonden, Navigare Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech, also took part. Based in Solna, on the Karolinska campus near Stockholm, the company has developed an enzyme immobilization technology for manufacturing cosmetics, food and pharma ingredients with cleaner, less energy-intensive processes.
At Uclic, we like to go beyond the press release. I spoke with Aymeric de Gantès, CEO of enginzyme since May 2025, during a Paris-Lille train ride with patchy reception. He explained the technology through cooking analogies, talked about the shift from science to market he was brought in to accelerate, and detailed the strategy this round is meant to fund.
An accelerator you can reuse
An enzyme is a natural catalyst: it speeds up a chemical reaction without significant energy requirements, and does not generate major production residues.
"That's why it's a clean technology."
Yet its industrial use remains limited, mainly because of the way processes were designed.
"Most processes, especially in food, never considered that enzymes could be used more than once."
That's where enginzyme comes in. The company fixes enzymes onto insoluble supports, so they can be reused batch after batch.
"Picture your enzyme as a coffee bean. What we make is a coffee bean you can use several times, with its filter."
The whole challenge is fixing the enzyme without making it lose its efficiency.
"If I put you on a leash so you don't wander too far, you'll run slower. That's the technological balance we deal with every day."
This immobilization process is the core of the technology. Around it, enginzyme has gradually built a platform, EziG, that lets it step in at different stages of a customer's project.
Two ways into an industrial customer
In the first case, the manufacturer starts from scratch. Aymeric de Gantès gives the example of a global cosmetics leader that has set biomanufacturing targets for the active ingredients in its products by 2030. The customer comes with a molecule it would like to produce enzymatically, without knowing how to go about it. Enginzyme then does enzyme engineering, with the help of AI: identifying a few candidate enzymes, observing how they behave, improving them, and then working on the combination of the enzyme and its support.
In the second case, the manufacturer already uses enzymes supplied by others. Enginzyme then relies on its immobilization technology, which it says outperforms its competitors', to improve an existing solution all the way to deployment in the plant.
The two entry points don't offer the same room for improvement.
"The earlier we start in the process, the better the performance at the end. It's like horse racing: if you can work on your jockey, your horse, how they work together and the type of race they'll run, it's much better. If you're handed a horse and a jockey and told it'll be eight kilometers, we'll do our best."
From scientific proof to commercial success
The round comes with a change of course: moving from scientific proof to commercial success. That was the step the company still had to take when Aymeric de Gantès arrived.
"The potential of the technology is obvious. The company was founded by scientists who were very good at the technology, and very good at raising money."
Between 2020 and 2022, enginzyme closed a Series A and then a Series B. According to its CEO, the company had raised around €40 million in total by then. In 2024, it became clear that the commercial targets would not be met on the planned timeline. The board then chose to hand the leadership to a more market-oriented profile. Karim Engelmark Cassimjee, co-founder and scientist, became Chief Innovation Officer. Aymeric de Gantès was approached at the end of 2024 and took over in May 2025.
His background partly explains that choice. Before enginzyme, he worked for a biotech that used enzymes, later acquired by a large American group where he ran an innovation platform. He talked with startups every day.
"You should have seen the gap between their theoretical technology and how their solutions actually performed."
What convinced him at enginzyme was a technology designed to be used in factories, and therefore judged on its real-world performance.
"Reality is counted at the end of the song. In the plant."
Five workstreams to put business back at the center
The first workstream was to refocus the company on its key technology, immobilization.
The second, to choose priority industries. Enginzyme now focuses on personal care, meaning cosmetics and hygiene.
The third, to decide where the company stops in the value chain. Until now it targeted several links at once, from selling pharma ingredients to designing R&D projects for the food industry. The positioning is now clear: helping customers manufacture their own products more efficiently.
"When we sell to our customers, we don't sell a personal care ingredient, we sell a solution for manufacturing personal care ingredients."
The fourth, to build a sales team. Out of 35 employees, the company had two people in charge of sales: a lawyer and a scientist. Enginzyme hired an experienced Chief Commercial Officer (CCO).
The fifth, to reorganize decision-making around commercial objectives. Product lifecycle management (PLM), profitability and marketing now report to the CCO. R&D remains independent, but it now works on briefs and projects that come with a business case.
That last workstream is still underway, and it touches the profiles themselves.
"To play a piece of music, you need a composer, musicians, a conductor, instruments. In R&D, we only had composers. Twelve composers in an opera just doesn't work."
Enginzyme is therefore redefining some roles and adjusting its hiring to balance skills across the teams.
A go-to-market aimed at innovation leaders
This is the part we find most interesting at Uclic. Enginzyme sells exclusively B2B, to large manufacturers, and relies on two channels.
The first is direct outreach, most often at the level of Chief Innovation Officers, with an early demonstration of value.
"We tell them: look, you make this. We think we can help you make the same product with a 40% productivity gain."
The second runs through events. On one side, trade shows, such as the personal care industry gathering in Berlin the week we spoke, where the team meets customers and prospects. On the other, innovation and bioeconomy forums, which the company accesses notably through its board. Enginzyme spoke on stage at ChangeNOW, at the Grand Palais in Paris, and will return in April 2027 to launch new products. Aymeric de Gantès was expected the following week in London, at a World Economic Forum bioeconomy convention.
This second channel reflects the nature of the targets. Large, long-established chemicals and cosmetics groups are reached through corporate innovation more than through traditional prospecting.
Metrics measured in the plant
Enginzyme sells in two forms: research projects, and enzymatic solutions billed by the kilo. The metrics it tracks follow from that.
The first is the conversion rate by entry point. The second is conversion speed, a major issue for long industrial processes. In Indonesia, a manufacturer is currently testing enginzyme's solutions on a cleaner palm oil processing method. The test has been running for six months.
"These are very long processes, while cash is obviously the lifeblood of a startup, of a biotech."
The third metric is the real productivity of the solutions, measured application by application, customer by customer and plant by plant, depending on each site's piping and filtration systems. It forces the company to test its technology against the field.
"Today we're learning, with our customers, the real productivity of our solutions, outside the lab, in the plant."
It is also the only argument that matters to a plant manager, who only believes what he measures on his own production line.
The target model: customers for fifteen years
Reusing enzymes has a direct commercial consequence. Once installed at a customer's site, the solution can stay there for a long time.
"As long as they're happy with our solutions, it's five, ten, fifteen years. You build a business base that renews itself. If you only do R&D projects, you start from zero every time."
That base also makes it possible to improve performance over time.
"You're hired in a pastry shop to make chocolate cakes. You can always improve your recipe."
Aymeric de Gantès cites a model that inspires him: Kemin, an American company that supplies natural preservation solutions, based on rosemary derivatives or ascorbic acid, for pet food and meat products. Every year, Kemin improves the performance of its formulations by 3 to 7%, and keeps the same customers for decades.
"They've been in the same ham for twenty-five years, because every year they improve on what they did the year before."
He remains cautious about the timeline.
"To be completely transparent, we're not there yet. We're on the first runs of our solutions as we speak."
No digital marketing before the proof
Enginzyme does not do content marketing yet, for three reasons. The company doesn't have the resources, and it isn't a priority. It still lacks customer proof, since it is in the testing phase. Finally, it first wants to carry out life cycle assessments (LCA) of its products, so it can quantify the full value delivered, in productivity as well as environmental impact.
The 2027 budget plans a half-time position dedicated to digital marketing starting in the fourth quarter of 2027.
"We'll be very proud to communicate the day we can explain the full value we deliver."
Key takeaways
Three lessons from this conversation that go beyond industrial biotech.
First: solid technology is not enough to build a company. Enginzyme had the science, top-tier investors and industry recognition. What it still needed was a commercial organization. The change of CEO, the hiring of a CCO and the move of product and marketing under the commercial function show that priorities have changed, and that you can read it in the org chart.
Second: choosing where you stop in the value chain is a commercial decision. By giving up selling its own ingredients to sell a manufacturing solution instead, enginzyme embeds itself in its customers' plants, where the relationship can last fifteen years.
Third: in industry, proof is measured at the customer's site. Conversion rate, conversion speed, productivity plant by plant: the metrics chosen by Aymeric de Gantès all start from real-world performance. For an industrial buyer, it is the only argument that counts, and it is also what will shape the company's communication.
We'll be keeping a close eye on enginzyme's first industrial deployments and its product launches at ChangeNOW in April 2027.
Enginzyme at a glance
- Headquarters: Solna, Sweden, on the Karolinska campus.
- Founded in 2014 by Karim Engelmark Cassimjee, now Chief Innovation Officer.
- CEO: Aymeric de Gantès, since May 2025.
- Headcount: around 35 people.
- Technology: patented enzyme immobilization (EziG platform), for biomanufacturing without living organisms.
- Markets: personal care first, plus food and pharma.
- Model: research projects and sales of enzymatic solutions by the kilo.
- Latest round: SEK 75M (just under €7M), September 2026. Lotus One Investment and Valquest Partners Europe join the cap table and the board, alongside Sofinnova Partners, Industrifonden, Navigare Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech.
- Previous funding: Series A (2020) and Series B (2022).
- Website: enginzyme.com
Article published by Uclic, a growth marketing and AI agency. Interview conducted by Alexis Christine-Amara on October 16, 2026.